Group Replication: Shipped Too Early

With Oracle clearly entering the “open source high availability solutions” arena with the release of their brand new Group Replication solution, I believe it is time to review the quality of the first GA (production ready) release.

TL;DR: Having examined the technology, it is my conclusion that Oracle seems to have released the GA version of Group Replication too early. While the product is definitely “working prototype” quality, the release seems rushed and unfinished. I found a significant number of issues, and I would personally not recommend it for production use.

It is obvious that Oracle is trying hard to ship technology to compete with Percona XtraDB Cluster, which is probably why they rushed to claim Group Replication GA quality.

If you’re all set to follow along and test Group Replication yourself, simplify the initial setup by using this Docker image. We can review some of the issues you might face together.

For the record, I tested the version based on MySQL 5.7.17 release.

No automatic provisioning

First off, the first thing you’ll find is there is NO way to automatically setup of a new node.

If you need to setup new node or recover an existing node from a fatal failure, you’ll need to manually provision the slave.

Of course, you can clone a slave using Percona XtraBackup or LVM by employing some self-developed scripts. But given the high availability nature of the product, one would expect Group Replication to automatically re-provision any failed node.

Bug: stale reads on nodes

One line summary: while any secondary nodes are “catching up” to whatever happened on a first node (it takes time to apply changes on secondary nodes), reads on a secondary node could return stale data (as shown in the bug report).

This behavior brings us back to the traditional asynchronous replication slave behavior (i.e., Group Replication’s predecessor).

Discussion:

The items highlighted above might not seem too bad at first, and you could assume that your workload won’t be affected. However, stale reads and node dysfunctions basically prevent me from running a more comprehensive evaluation.

My recommendation:

If you care about your data, then I recommend not using Group Replication in production. Currently, it looks like it might cause plenty of headaches, and it is easy to get inconsistent results.

For the moment, Group Replication appears an advanced – but broken – traditional MySQL asynchronous replication.

I understand Oracle’s dilemma. Usually people are hesitant to test a product that is not GA. So in order to get feedback from users, Oracle needs to push the product to GA. Oracle must absolutely solve the issues above during future QA cycles.

Vadim’s expertise in LAMP performance and multi-threaded programming help optimize MySQL and InnoDB internals to take full advantage of modern hardware. Oracle Corporation and its predecessors have incorporated Vadim’s source code patches into the mainstream MySQL and InnoDB products.

He also co-authored the book High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication 3rd Edition.

Hi Vadim, the facebook post is public, it links to this my previously published post in the 2nd comment. I realized it was not obvious as more comments were added, so I edited the facebook post and added the original link below.
http://jfg-mysql.blogspot.nl/2015/11/disappointment-at-mysql-ecosystem.html

Actually, I mostly agree with Vadim. Group replication is rather new technology; interesting for sure, but should not be advertised as production ready IMHO. On the other hand, with Galera Cluster being a way more mature and proven solution, I can see why Oracle is in a rush with this…